Timewave Zero and Language

by Terence McKenna

Part II

In part I of "Timewave Zero" Terence McKenna initiated the reader into his
theory of nature's upcoming quantum jump out of history. Looking at the I
Ching from a quantum physics perspective, Terence and his brother
Dennis
discovered a wave pattern in the ordering of the Tarot's trigrams and
hexagrams that suggested time could be mapped. One of the oldest "structured
abstractions" known, the I Ching has been found scratched on the 6,000
year-old shoulder bone of a sheep. Since the I Ching is particularly
concerned with the dynamic relationships and transformations that archetypes
undergo, McKenna intuited that the I Ching must also be deeply involved with
the nature of time as the necessary condition for the manifestation of
archetypes as categories of experience.

Centering his attention on examining the King Wen sequence of sixty four
hexagrams, McKenna's search for the ordering principles that lay behind it
managed to translate what was essentially a mystical diagram into a
rationally apprehensible, mathematical model. Working with Peter Meyer,
McKenna developed a personal computer software package that takes his
discoveries concerning the I Ching and creates time maps based upon them.
These time maps, or novelty maps, show the ebb an flow of connectedness, or
novelty, in any span of time from a few days to tens of millennia.

In McKenna's novelty map, when the graph line moves downward, novelty is
assumed to be increasing. When there is movement away from the base line,
novelty is assumed to be decreasing in favor of habitual forms of activity.
According to this graph, one trend toward greater novelty reached its
culmination around 2700 B.C., precisely at the height of the Old Kingdom
pyramid-building phase. Perhaps most remarkable of all McKenna's discoveries
was the fact that the only point in the entire wave that has a quantified
value of zero is December 21, 2012 A.D. -- the same date that has been
interpreted as the Mayan Calendar's end of time.

The Timewave zero model shows the past 1,500 years to have been highly novel
times that have oscillated at levels of novelty very close to the horizontal
axis, the maximized "zero state." When the zero point is reached, the wave
passes out of the past and into the future. We are approaching a point, says
McKenna, "when the rational and acausal tendencies inherent in time may
again reverse their positions of dominance."

McKenna views history, with it's hunger for completion, as "an anomaly... a
complete fluke," in which "all ideas of salvation, enlightenment, or utopia
may be taken to be expressions in consciousness of the drive of energy to
free itself from the limitations of three-dimensional space." As history
races toward it's denouement, evolution is carried out of strictly
biological confines and into the mental realm where language and other
abstractions begin to pull us together toward "a complex attractor that
exists ahead of us in time." This "concrescence," says McKenna is now so
close that it can be felt in the sense of accelerating time and complexity.

In the second part of this article, McKenna discusses the repercussions of
our collective approach to Timewave Zero and how psychedelics can be used to
condition ourselves for our upcoming move into of the body of eternity and
out of three-dimensional time and space.

The First Three Minutes is a book in which author Stephen Weinberg leads the
reader through all the complex physics as matter is crystallizing out of
hyperspace, and the universe is undergoing its initial expansion in the
first three minutes of creation. When you consider this model of exploding
galaxies, colliding quasars, and mega this and mega that, it's worth noting
that these distant parts of the universe register only as faint tracings on
our instruments, until they are interpreted through the fishy fiat of a
bunch of stacked up theories and formulas. And where is our data sample
coming from? Radio telescopes, which are responsible for building our
current picture of the universe, were only invented around 1950. All the
energy that has fallen on all the radio telescopes on this planet since the
invention of radio telescopy is less energy than would be generated by a
cigarette ash falling a distance of two feet. It's pretty flimsy stuff
folks, compared to the meat of the moment in which we find ourselves.

It seems more likely to me that all this complexity is better directed
toward the end of the cycle when, after billions of years of evolution,
everything finally comes together. Alfred North Whitehead proposed this same
idea. He said that history grows toward what he called a "nexus of
completion." And these nexuses of completion themselves grow together into
what he called the "concrescence." A concrescence exerts a kind of
attraction, which can be thought of as the temporal equivalent of gravity,
except all objects in the universe are drawn toward it through time, not
space.

As we approach the lip of this cascade into concrescence, novelty, and
completion, time seems to speed up and boundaries begin to dissolve. The
more boundaries that dissolve, the closer to the concrescence we are. When
we finally reach it, there will be no boundaries, only eternity as we become
all space and time, alive and dead, here and there, before and after.
Because this singularity can simultaneously co-exist in states that are
contradictory, it is something which transcends rational apprehension. But
it gives the universe meaning, because all processes can be seen to be
seeking and moving in an effort to approximate, connect with, and append to
this transcendental object at the end of time.

One way of thinking about it is to compare it to one of those mirrored disco
balls, which sends out thousands of reflections off of everybody and
everything in the room. The mirrored disco ball is the transcendental object
at the end of time, and those reflected twinkling, refractive lights are
religions, scientific theories, gurus, works of art, poetry, great orgasms,
great souffles, great paintings, etc. Anything that has, in Nietszche's
phrase, the "spark of divinity within it," is in fact, referent to the
original force of the spark of all divinity unfolding itself within the
confines of three-dimensional space.

A quick look at Western civilization over the past several hundred years
suggests we are indeed moving toward the concrescence. The twentieth century
has only accelerated the process of increasing novelty and the dissolving of
old boundaries. In our own time, we have created ever more elaborate
languages and ever more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing,
and retrieving language, so that we are now on the brink of being able to
give every single person the complete cultural inventory, the complete data
base of human beings' experience on this planet. It's as if the collectivity
of our humanness has finally become an intellectual legacy for all of us.
That's what these data highways and networks are all about. The nervous
system is being hardwired. This is not only an advance deeper and deeper
into novelty, but it is an advance in which each successive stage occurs
more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

Following the breakdown of the Soviet Union, there was much talk about
"lifting of the Iron Curtain." I find this phrase interesting because it
conjures up images of a membrane suddenly disappearing, as indeed it has. As
more and more of these membranes disappear, what is emerging is a sense of
acceleration of information flow and a sense of rising ambiguity and
apprehension. That's why it's important to realize what the process is. As
human beings, we are unique for our ability to feel, to download experience,
to connect disparate data fields, and then to project a goal, a hope--a
distant coordination of concern that leads toward an appetite for
completion. That's what the concrescence is. It's not some alien thing
injected into our forward moving timestream like a boulder on the floor of a
river. The concrescence is the lost path of our collective soul. The
metaphor that makes sense for what we're going through -- because it gets
the biology of it; it gets the drama of it; it gets the risk of it; it gets
the the fun and joy of it -- is the metaphor of birth.

To see the picture clearly, you must break out of the flat cultural illusion
and rise up to look at the situation. That's why psychedelics are so
important. They raise you out of the historical maxtrix, giving you a sense
of participation in a transcendental reality. Psychedelics catalyze
imagination. They drive you to think what you did not think otherwise. There
is a good argument that the critical catalyst that propelled us out of the
slowly evolving hominid line -- causing us to take a right-hand turn into
culture, language, art, and learning -- was probably the inclusion of
psychedelic plants in our diet during that episodic moment when we went from
fruitarian, canopy dwellers to omnivorous pack hunting creatures of the
grasslands.

It's interesting that DMT and psilocybin, so closely related to each other,
both have something to say about language, and that they say it in precisely
opposite ways. Psilocybin is a teaching
voice that speaks to you in your language. LSD
doesn't do that; ayahuasca doesn't do that.
Psilocybin does, for some reason. This
is not my illusion. It's a commonly noted effect, but if you don't speak to
it, it won't be there. DMT doesn't speak to you
in English; it speaks to you in Elfish. What happens on high dose
DMT is that you see the speaker. With
mushrooms, you almost never encounter a
being you can see. You see hallucinations, but you do not see the author of
the data stream. On DMT, the entities come
bounding out of the woodwork. DMT is not like a
psychedelic drug, in the sense that you're getting into the contents of
your hopes, memories, fears and dreams. It's much more like a parallel
continuum. It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data
space. You find yourself in an inconceivable world where everything has been
replaced by elf machinery. There are these self-dribbling, jeweled
basketball-looking entities that use this musical sing-song language to
condense visible objects out of the air. Why are they doing that? I assume
that on one level they are trying to teach, but it's more than that. On
another level, they seem to be giving a demonstration of the fact that
reality is made of language. They're saying, "If you don't believe reality
is made of language, here I'll make you one."

So these opalescent beings make all these things and set them loose in this
strange environment, and these things, themselves, are emitting language and
making other things. Everybody's chattering, screeching, crawling over each
other, clamoring for your attention, and under sufficiently hyped-up
conditions, you are able to reply in a kind of spontaneous glossolalia.
There's a bit of art in making this peculiar pseudo-linguistic stream of
syllables, and when you're stoned, it's an incredibly pleasurable
experience.

I think that this glossolalia is probably mixed up with the generation of
language itself. In other words, we probably invented language long before
meaning, and it was some very practical person who got the idea that the
words could have meaning. Before that, language was primarily verbal
amusement. After all, the most readily at hand musical instrument is the
human voice. Sound is an incredibly powerful transducer of energy that we
haven't really come to terms with. When we put a test tube in which a
chemical reaction is going on, into a square wave generator and bombard it
with very high amplitude sounds, we find that these sounds drive the
chemical reaction faster, as if sound were an enzyme. When people are loaded
to the gills on ayahuasca, they do the same thing. They sing for hours and
sonically drive these states, navigating through a world of vocal landscapes
that come forth from sound.

Magical philosophy, which has about fifty to a hundred thousand years under
its belt -- as opposed to science which only goes back to the Renaissance --
has always claimed that the world is made of language. The world is a thing
of words, and if you know these words, you can take it apart and put it
together any old way you wish. Sanskrit, for example, has the reputation for
being a magical language. There are supposedly certain ragas -- arrangements
on sounds with particular rhythms -- that can cause a haystack to burst into
flame. The nub of what I'm trying to get at here is that the world is made
of language. Our entire Western religious tradition begins with the
incredibly cryptic statement, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word
was made flesh." What is this making the word into flesh? And does it not
imply that eventually the flesh will become word?

As we now know, since the discovery of DNA, we arise out of sequences of
what are called codons, which are the nucleotide units in the DNA which code
for protein. The messenger RNA takes the template of the DNA and runs itself
through a ribosome, and the ribosome gathers amino acids out of the ambient
environment, connecting them up to create a protein. What this means is that
we are, in fact, textural. Each one of us is a word of approximately
700,000,000 characters, and this word is made flesh when the sperm and the
egg form a zygote and the DNA textural message is downloaded into matter.
Now we are on the brink of decoding the human genome, and the end result of
this is that the flesh will be made word.

It's interesting that many of the psychedelic compounds involved in the
language phenomena, like DMT and harmine and
harmaline, occur as part of human metabolism, ordinarily. And harmaline,
specifically 5-methoxy tetrahydroharmalan, occurs in the pineal gland. The
pineal gland has always been thought of as somehow connected to the soul.
Descartes called it the seat of the soul. What I'm trying to get at here,
is the the world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but
which we're edging toward understanding. I think of history as a kind of
mass psychedelic experience. The drug is technology, and as technology
gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind, the cultural
experiences becomes more and more hallucinatory.

Our planet is on a collision course with something that we, at our present
state of knowledge, don't have a word for. A black hole is simply a
gravitationally massive object, so massive that no light can leave it. What
I'm talking about is something like that, except that it isn't so much
gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are soon to be sucked into
the body of eternity. My model points to 11:18 am, Greenwich Mean Time,
December 21, 2012 AD.

My notion is fairly simple. History is a set of nested resonances with each
epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it. This event horizon is
like a series of ghost horizons, and once you enter into history, you enter
into the outer shell of the temporal field of the attractor or the
concrescence. In other words, history is the disturbance in nature which
precedes the concrescence. It precedes it by only 50 thousand years -- a
geological microsecond -- before all life is melted down in the presence of
the singularity. History is a curious interzone that is not the singularity
and not the absence of the singularity; it's the singularity in the act of
becoming. It only lasts a geological microsecond, but if you happen to be
born as we are, inside that microsecond, then you have a very curious
perspective on the phenomenon because you observe it from inside.

Within history's series of nested cycles, each cycle is only human/machine
interfacing, pharmacological redesigning of the human brain/mind system,
possibly digitalizing and downloading into the microphysical realm.

All these disparate physical elements come to nothing if they don't add up
to more than the sum of their parts. And the more than the sum of their
parts is the transcendental element we call love. That is part of the
eschaton that has never left us, but accompanied us across the African
grassland and into history. Love has been bloodied and battered by the
experiences of sexism and racism and so forth. But never lost as an ideal,
never lost as a guiding light and an experience, and when we dissolve all
the boundaries, this is what we will discover; an unconditional caring, an
unconditional affection that goes through all life and all matter and gives
it meaning. You don't have to wait for the end of the world to get this
news. You can just short circuit the collective march toward that
realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality through the
use of the hallucinogens. They are the doorways that the Gaian mind has
installed in the historical process to let anybody out any time they want
out, provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk through the
door.